Counter-Terrorism: Conflict Zones

Charlie Elphicke Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

Decisions about individual aspects of Scotland Yard’s budget are a matter for the Metropolitan police. Let me be clear that the Government have protected counter-terrorism policing budgets over our period in office, and we have extended that to 2015-16.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

Given that many of these terrorists represent a clear and present danger to our country, our national security and the security of individuals, is it not important that we offer our intelligence services more powers, particularly through human rights reform and a communications data Bill, to ensure that we can secure our nation properly?

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about the impact that human rights legislation has sometimes had, for example on our ability to deport certain individuals who pose a threat to us here in the UK. I am clear that we need to reform our human rights legislation and introduce a communications data Bill, and a Conservative Government after 7 May will do just that.

Terrorist Attacks (Paris)

Charlie Elphicke Excerpts

Wednesday 14th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for his comments. It is important that someone such as him stands up in this Chamber and gives a clear message about terrorism, and says that none of us supports terrorism and that we condemn it absolutely. At the time we indicated the areas of the Communications Data Bill where we were willing to make changes in response to the views from the Joint Committee—indeed, we said that we were taking on board virtually all the comments made by that Committee.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

Does the Home Secretary agree that if we are to be serious about our internal security and the safety and security of our borders, including at Dover, we must promote the unity of integration over the division of multiculturalism? It is important to ensure that our borders are properly strengthened and that security is maintained, including at Calais.

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend is right, and as I indicated in my statement in immediate response to the attacks in Paris, the Border Force and others at our borders took appropriate steps to increase security and intensify the checks taking place. It is right that we maintain an appropriate level of security at our borders, both in the UK but also at juxtaposed controls elsewhere. It is also important to recognise that within the United Kingdom there are people of a variety of faiths and of no faith. We must all accept people of different faiths, and recognise that people have different beliefs. If we disagree with them, the way to deal with that is through discussion. It is important to allow people the freedom to worship as they wish and follow the faith they wish to follow.

Oral Answers to Questions

Charlie Elphicke Excerpts

Monday 5th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

We remain on track to support several hundred vulnerable individuals over the next three years. The figures underline that. Those who benefit from the scheme are chosen by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, with whom we work in close co-operation. It is therefore the UNHCR that advances and puts forward individual cases based on the vulnerability-type factors that the hon. Lady identified.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

11. What recent discussions she has had with the French authorities on border security at Calais.

[The Minister for Security and Immigration (James Brokenshire)]

It is in the interests of both the UK and France to work together to tackle migratory pressures at Calais. The Home Secretary last met the French Interior Minister on 5 December. We continue to work closely with the French authorities on all matters of border security and cross-border criminality to maintain the integrity of our joint border controls.

[Charlie Elphicke]

Can my hon. Friend confirm that the £12 million in the agreement will be spent on bolstering security and not on a welcome centre at Calais? Will he also reject representations from UKIP that the border controls at Calais should be scrapped and brought back to Dover?

[James Brokenshire]

I am very pleased to underline the points that my hon. Friend makes. We are not providing financial support for any day centres. Our financial support is focused on security at Calais and on confronting the organised criminality that seeks to take advantage of those trying to come to the UK. The juxtaposed controls absolutely benefit this country and we have no plans to change that.

HM Passport Office

Charlie Elphicke Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

My constituents in Dover and Deal are deeply concerned about border security, and whatever pressure the Home Secretary may be put under by a Labour party that has a great tradition of allowing anyone to just wander in, will she ensure that the safety and security of our borders and passports are not compromised?

[Mrs May]

That is absolutely clear. That is the attitude that we have taken throughout the immigration system. For the first time ever, we have an operating mandate for our Border Force and our border security, and as I said earlier in response to the shadow Home Secretary, one of the reasons for bringing overseas passport applications into HMPO was to have greater consistency in how they are assessed and enable expertise to be used in better detecting fraud.

Extremism

Charlie Elphicke Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I apologise—I did not quite catch the beginning of the hon. Gentleman’s question. We look closely across the board at how the Home Office budget is spent. We also look closely at the Prevent funding, and we have introduced measures, which were not there under the last Government, to ensure that we can ascertain not only how much is being spent on a particular project but the effectiveness of the spend. The last Government did not seek to find out whether they were spending public money effectively.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

Does the Home Secretary share my concern that there have been too many occasions when the battle against extremism has been hampered by European human rights? Does she agree that human rights reform will enable us not only to take the battle to extremists but to promote integration and make our communities safer and more secure?

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend returns to a topic on which he has questioned me in the past, and on which I have made a number of statements in the House. In the cases of the extradition of Abu Hamza and the deportation of Abu Qatada, there were certainly delays due to the operation of the European Court of Human Rights. I have also made it clear in the House that the Conservative party is committed to going into the election with policies relating to the reform of the Human Rights Act 1998 and of our relationship with the European Court.

Oral Answers to Questions

Charlie Elphicke Excerpts

Monday 28th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Karen Bradley]

That is also an interesting suggestion that I will look into, although I cannot promise where we will get to.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

When I visited the migrant camps at Calais with the deputy mayor of Calais, every person there said that they had paid traffickers to get there, putting them in danger of labour exploitation in the UK. Will Home Office Ministers consider supporting a joint initiative by Dover and Calais for the French police to clear those camps and repatriate people or process their asylum claims, as the case may be?

[Karen Bradley]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. I know how hard he works in his constituency on these matters. We work closely with our counterparts in the French police to deal with this issue, and my hon. Friend makes an important point. Many victims of modern slavery that I have met came into the country willingly but illegally, because they felt they were coming for a better life. They have been exploited; that is not right and we need to stamp that out.

Yarl’s Wood Immigration Centre (Detainee Death)

Charlie Elphicke Excerpts

Monday 31st March 2014 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

Significant changes and improvements have been made, including to the commissioning functions that the NHS has in respect of providing appropriate medical support in immigration removal centres. We constantly learn from cases as we seek to prevent further tragic incidents. I assure my hon. Friend that we will continue to do that, and I will focus on these issues of medical support in respect of Yarl’s Wood. A report has been commissioned, and I will pursue the matter.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

In reviewing this tragic case, will the Minister consider carefully the strong and passionate case that has been made over a long period by my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller)? Does the Minister also agree that too many people are in these institutions for too long, including the Dover removal centre, and we should hurry up the processing as much as we can?

[James Brokenshire]

I agree that we should always seek to minimise the time that someone spends in detention, but appeals can often delay matters. The Immigration Bill will reduce appeals from 17 to four. We want to ensure that we have a firm but fair system, and that is what we will deliver.

Oral Answers to Questions

Charlie Elphicke Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

There is no delay. The UK has some of the most robust and effective legislation in the world to deal with terrorist suspects and we will not hesitate to use every power at our disposal to protect the security of this country. The hon. Lady makes a fair point in relation to travel to Syria. We are very clear that people should not travel to Syria, and our counter-terrorism legislation is there to uphold the law. We are using the royal prerogative to remove passports from British nationals who it is believed wish to travel abroad to take part in activities such as terrorist training or other fighting.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

Does the Minister agree that many of the problems we have with counter-terrorism and TPIMs would be made vastly easier if we had reform of European human rights so that we can ensure that the Supreme Court is supreme once again?

[James Brokenshire]

My hon. Friend has consistently made this point about human rights, and he is obviously well aware of a number of the measures that we have been looking at. Clearly, we have taken steps to ensure, for example, that we are better able to deport individuals and that our focus remains on deportation with assurance to ensure that those who would cause us harm and can be removed are removed from this country.

Immigration Bill

Charlie Elphicke Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Straw]

There are some instances where it is obvious, and some where it is less obvious. The hon. Gentleman is correct to say that even if a judgment is made by the Attorney-General, and indeed if the declaration is made by the British courts of incompatibility with the convention rights, section 4 of the Act makes it absolutely crystal clear that those provisions remain in force. That was part of the elegant architecture of the Human Rights Act. The role of the Parliamentary Counsel was to ensure that parliamentary sovereignty over individual legislation was maintained. The problem of the hon. Gentleman—as he knows I really wanted to support his position—is that the Home Secretary has a duty under section 19 of the Act to say whether or not the provisions in the Bill as it goes forward are or are not compatible with the convention.

I once signed a certificate saying that a particular Bill was not compatible with the convention, and Parliament still passed it. None the less, it does create difficulties. We cannot suddenly, on a wing and a prayer, say, “Well, in five years’ time, this will end up before the Strasbourg Court.” It is something that will come before Parliament at the next stage of this legislation.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

I am slightly troubled by the right hon. Gentleman’s argument. When the original Act was brought forward, the Home Office publication was clear. It said that the Bill provides for legislation

“to be interpreted so far as possible so as to be compatible with the Convention. This goes far beyond the present rule which enables the courts to take the Convention into account in resolving any ambiguity in a legislative provision.”

At the time the Human Rights Act was put before the House, the Home Office knew exactly how far-reaching the change would be.

[Mr Straw]

I do not follow the hon. Gentleman’s point. None the less, it is still the case that the Home Secretary signs a certificate under section 19 saying that the Bill is compatible with the convention. Section 3 of the Act requires primary legislation to be read and given effect in a way that is compatible with convention rights, and that is what we are talking about. Parliament can pass any Act it wants. It may be incompatible, but it can still be in force. We are all concerned to ensure that as many people as possible are deported, where it is justifiable, as quickly as possible.

[Charlie Elphicke]

The right hon. Gentleman was saying that the courts had gone too far in the interpretation of section 3. My point was that the Home Office at the time was clear that that was the purpose it wanted to achieve.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pete Wishart]

That is not my view of the correspondence that I have seen. I am surprised that the Minister says such a thing because the Bill is foreign to how we want to run our NHS. It has nothing to do with how we want to deliver our devolved services. We are not privatising the NHS like they are down here; we want to invest in it and ensure that it sticks to the ’45 principles of “from cradle to grave”. We fundamentally disagree with the Government about the need for such measures, and we want an LCM so that we can say clearly to them, “Stay out of our devolved services. Keep your race with UKIP out of our delivery of the NHS and other devolved services.” I still hope, although it is probably too late, that we will have an LCM.

A number of the measures in the group are pretty chilling, one of which is new clause 18, on which the Home Secretary spent such a good part of her hour and a half speech. What an appalling measure. This is about removing citizenship from people. Watching the Home Secretary’s attempts to respond to the many searching “what happens if” questions would almost have been comical were it not so sad. She could not start to answer the simple question—some of my hon. colleagues on this side of the House might want to revisit this during the winding-up speeches—of what happens to someone who is stripped of their UK citizenship but is not taken by any other country. I think I heard something along the lines of, “We might give them their citizenship back,” but if that is the case, what is the point of doing it in the first place? Who is going to take these people? Are we going to launch them into orbit and leave them circling round the Earth as stateless people without any sort of citizenship? Is France going to take them, or Germany? [Interruption.] What about an independent Scotland, I am asked. Where will those people go? This is the big question that the Home Secretary has been unable to answer: what will happen to those people once they have been deprived of their citizenship? What will happen to their children, or the people who depend on them? We really need to hear from her on that.

The Home Secretary is effectively asking us to agree to allow her to rip up the passports of people who live in this country. As I have said, these measures have been introduced so late in order to prevent Back Benchers from having the opportunity to speak about the most important parts of the Bill and so that they cannot be voted on, which is absolutely appalling. In fact, to say that the Government’s amendments look like they had been written on the back of a fag packet is to do a disservice to some fantastic speeches that I have heard delivered from the back of a fag packet. Little thought seems to have gone into them.

The plans for the revocation of citizenship have been made by the Home Secretary behind closed doors and without any sort of due process or transparency. Hon. Members might have seen the reports in The Independent today about how some people have subsequently been killed in US drone strikes or rendered to secret locations to be interrogated by the FBI. Perhaps that is what will happen to all these people. They are being betrayed by their own Government, whose duty is to protect them, not throw them under a bus in order to help powerful allies, which looks like what we will be doing. She said that we are simply returning to the situation that existed before 2003, but the UK has signed and ratified the 1961 convention on the reduction of statelessness, to which more than 50 states are signatories. We will now be breaking that.

I will speak briefly about new clause 15, tabled by the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab). We know, as has been said again and again, that Conservative Members do not much care for article 8 of the European convention on human rights. They would have us believe that there are all sorts of foreign criminals marauding across our communities, living the life of Riley on benefits and then going home to phone their expensive lawyers, saying, “Get me off on article 8.” That is the type of image they present. They continue to attack some of the great protections that we have secured over many decades on the back of the European convention on human rights. We are now seeing yet another attack on our human rights. It is no surprise that it comes from the Conservative Back Benches. I very much hope that we will resist it.

[Charlie Elphicke]

On a point of clarification, and in relation to the new clause tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab), if Scotland were to become independent, does the hon. Gentleman believe that it would not only petition to join the European Union as a new accession state, but seek to join the Council of Europe?

[Pete Wishart]

Yes, and I will tell the hon. Gentleman something else: an independent Scotland will sign up fully to the European convention on human rights and take our responsibility in that regard very seriously. We will not be cavalier, as this Government seem to be in their approach to some of these very important human rights. I look forward to the day when Scotland, as an independent nation, will take very seriously its responsibilities to protect our citizens and ensure that they are properly protected by international laws and regulations.

Oral Answers to Questions

Charlie Elphicke Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

It would be wrong to comment on the detailed operational issues surrounding TPIM subjects, as that could undermine the very work of the police and security services. The police and security services have been clear that TPIMs have been effective in reducing the risk from such individuals, and they have tailored plans in place to manage them. If any individual engages in any further terrorist-related activity after the expiry of their TPIM, the police will not hesitate to prosecute.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

Does this matter not underline the problems caused by European human rights and make stronger the case for human rights modernisation and reform to ensure that the UK Supreme Court has the final say?

[James Brokenshire]

As my hon. Friend will know, we are actively considering how to strike the right balance on human rights. The Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims and the Secretary of State for Justice are looking at that issue closely to ensure that the rights and freedoms of individuals are upheld properly in this country.